Microsoft executives already are counting their Vista chickens before the next-generation Windows release has hatched. A Microsoft vice president on Feb. 1 detailed for attendees of the Merrill Lynch IT Services & Software Conference Microsoft's reasons for its high expectations for Vista, the release of Windows client due to ship in the latter half of this year. Microsoft expects 200 million new PCs to ship with Vista preloaded in the first 24 months that the operating system is available, said Michael Sievert, corporate vice president, Windows Product Management & Marketing.

I wonder if Microsoft actually makes much extra profit with a new version of Windows. Very few people will actually go out and drop $250 on a retail copy of Vista when it comes out. Most people will just get it when it becomes time to buy a new PC.
So these 200 million new PCs, if Vista had not come out, they probably would have sold XP on 195 million new PCs.

Actually most consumers using Windows XP that haven't migrated to Linux or OSX will most likely upgrade. This is because of what I see as denial by end users who believe that Microsoft can be trusted to release a secure OS.

What Microsoft is relying on is Intel and AMD yet again switching their processor socket design which if you want to use it means you're upgrading more than your CPU. Though businesses are not like teenagers who want the latest and greatest hardware. So Microsoft will have a difficult time convincing them to upgrade.

I agree. Unless you're someone that had his/her head stuck in the sand for the past few years it's apparent there have been some very costly issues for consumers who use Windows. This is really unfortunate because with the associated price tag of Windows. Microsoft should be doing more to ensure security and piece of mind are at the top of their list over ease of use and how much money can be made.

"there are few real new features that definitively suggest a necessary upgrade"

They announced WinFS as being one of the biggest reasons users should upgrade to Windows Vista though now we hear Microsoft is dropping WinFS from Vista.

"because so many people are still on old versions of windows, microsoft will be unable to 'shut off' back support."

Dissagree with this comment. Microsoft especially with Windows XP has made every attempt to support older software and hardware. Though it's true with the hardware requirements for Vista being reported that it appears less likely Vista will have as wide legacy hardware support as Linux distributions.

"MSFT is already priced for total ownership of the OS market"

If you compare what it cost to buy a retail version of SUSE Linux/NLD from Novell compared to buying Windows XP and additional security software it's apparent why companies see Linux as having lower TCO. Also check around with distributors and notice how much lower the cost is for systems with either Linux installed or simply no OS. Windows does increase the over all cost of a system purchase.

>> Actually most consumers using Windows XP that haven't migrated to Linux or OSX will most likely upgrade.

that does not explain the legions of win98 and win2k users. i stand by my original point, and it also buttresses my point about support. microsoft had to support win2k far longer than they planned - the users (mostly business users) simply would not budge (and why should they?)

>> If you compare what it cost to buy a retail version of SUSE Linux/NLD from Novell compared to buying Windows XP

i was referring to the stock price (hence why i stated MSFT), and i stand by my original point that the stock already has total OS dominance priced into it.

Windows2000 support has not been extened "much longer" than they would like. I'm not even sure that support has even been extended.

Microsoft fully supports Windows for 5yrs, then you have the "extended support" period, where you get security updates and such, and then beyond that you have to pay for support. Al together like 8 years or so.

Microsoft keeps making money even when the market for commercial OS software is going down - inspite of Linux and free software offers from other companies like IBM, Sun, VmWare etc.

Absolutely, they'll continue to collect a tax on most major vendor PC's sold whether the customer is running Windows or not, and they'll continue to collect Software Assurance fees from customers that won't even bother with the upgrade entitlement they're paying for.

I'm not saying Vista won't be an improvement, but frankly with the current business model they could slap a new theme and default font onto XP, call it a new version and probably earn a comparable amount of licensing revenue without the inconvenient overhead of R&D.

The only single motivating factor Vista provides for companies to consider an upgrade is the improved security model, but then against most companies have dropped down bucketloads of cash building security infrastructures with third-party tools to compensate for Windows' inherent security flaws. So weighed against potential aggravations with legacy app incompatibilities, that could be a case of too little too late.

Vista will provide near identical growth as XP did; nobody but the early adopters will upgrade, a fact that MS has even acknowledged. Growth will come from new PC purchases and eventually, corporate migrations. Mactels might bleed some share away from MS in the consumer space, but in terms of MS' global market it will be a statisically irrelevant anomaly on their P&L. The real juice comes from corporate customers, where Microsoft's greatest security comes from linux's inability to date to provide a truly compelling and realistic migration option.

Mactels? Won't even be a measurable factor in the global enterprise market, and even if they were those poor customers would not only be locked in to Apple, but still likely locked into MS via MacOffice and maybe Exchange, anyways, which still puts more than enough profit into MS's pocket that it can mitigate the lack of Windows license fees for those Mactels. Except of course for those businesses required to dual-boot those Mactels for legacy app reasons. So Mactel business customers are even further entrenched in vendor lockin, and MS still comes out ahead.

Frankly, and this is just sad to say, Microsoft can't lose. It's only a question of just how much they will "gain".

1) If you want a good barometer on the health of Windows sales and actually getting used, the best thing to look at is the sales of Office and whether they match up with the sales of Windows - its very disingenuous for Microsoft to claim that x number of Windows machines have shipped when in reality, there are many corporate customers who wipe their machines as soon as they get it, and load their own licenced version of Windows XP onto them.

2) Linux isn't there yet - as much as the Linux backers would love to cheer around, businesses NEED applications, they don't want substitutes or replacements, they want the same applications running; and I'm sorry, opensource or third party replacements won't do.

Corporate customers want a drop in replacement where they can replace their operating system, run the same software; to coin a phrase, 'to hit the ground and continue running' - businesses don't have the time, money or the luxery of being able to find a substitute, retrain all its staff, and then migrate all its customise macro's and so forth over to the new software, its just not tangible.

3) Vista will win or lose based on not only what compelling features it brings, but what third parties can exploit out of the new operating system - for example, Adobe brings out a new version of Photoshop, it has several 'must have features' included in the new version, but the catch! those features are only available if you run it on Windows Vista.

Thats what will motivate people to upgrade - lets remember folks, people buy an operating system to run software, not the other way around - and when people look at the upgrade, it'll be a complete picture, not one or two features that will compell them to upgrade.

>> but frankly with the current business model they could slap a new theme and default font onto XP, call it a new version

agreed, and this appears to be what they have done, more or less.

>> The only single motivating factor Vista provides for companies to consider an upgrade is the improved security model

most businesses have done an end-run around the OS in any case with hardware filters, third-party antivirus, and extensive staffing. changing the status quo will be a cost, not a savings.

>> Mactels? Won't even be a measurable factor in the global enterprise market

normally i would agree with this, except i see more and more macs in every large office i walk through.

>> Frankly, and this is just sad to say, Microsoft can't lose

oddly enough they can lose...but mostly to a past version of themselves. their main problem continues to be forcing upgrades. xp migrations took far far longer than microsoft budgeted for, and they literally had to start calling office97 users 'dinosaurs' in ads to get them to migrate (needlessly) to a new version of the suite.

they have a major upgrade dilemma. it is now accepted in most businesses that code doesn't go 'poof' - the win2k users still happily working away years after their product was supposed to 'die' are testament to that.

the resounding truth that microsoft cannot accept is that software is dying. the web is the new platform. traditional software markets are flat, and open source is making incursions on the rapidly shrinking number of tools you actually need to install to run.

Between Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista, there really isn't any room for Linux on the market.

The small percentage left over is for the Mac and that is about it.

When Windows Viena comes out, Linux will be mainly a fad in consumers minds. Sure it will still be used in Serverland and small devices, but I think the time is up for Linux.

What happens when you give Windows Superior security and stability and offer innovative features, the linux bubble is over.

Linux TCO is overrated as well, just getting anything to work under Linux is a problem in itself and then you have to really know what you are doing and not many people know how to configure or run anything let alone get it working.

"Mactels? Won't even be a measurable factor in the global enterprise market, and even if they were those poor customers would not only be locked in to Apple, but still likely locked into MS via MacOffice and maybe Exchange"

Macs are a MUCH cheaper way to get security on your network than maintaining a boatload of IT stiffs.

As for MS Office-- that's YOUR fault. You know what the number two product after Office is? Not WordPerfect-- it's Apple's iWork, which doesn't even have a Windows version!. I simply can't understand why business types are so fixated on Office-- it sucks. Go with Open Office. Open Office is bloaty, too, but at least it's free. And don't get me started on Exchange-- a completely useless product without ANY valid utility in the workplace, IMHO.

Since when has there ever been a mass deployment of a new Microsoft OS? Companies were still deploying 16-bit Office and Windows 3.1 for up to two years after Windows 95 was released. It took a new Office version (Office 97) that was clearly worth it before businesses undertook the pain of an OS upgrade. MS doesn't have anything this time to act as a driver.

Most of the businesses in my region are already running XP and Office 2003. They'll be perfectly happy to keep running that for years. None of the companies I talked even want to think about Vista (or Office 12) until at least 2008 at the earliest.

We can count out a mass consumer upgrade because most consumers stick with the version of Windows that comes with their PC.

Microsoft isn't really counting their chickens, they're just trying to get some hatched.

Vista will be a great release, heck I can't wait to install the RTM version and see how it is on my gaming boxes

but the fact remains, that 200 million figure is probably correct and if anything, undervalued.

Vista will ship in it's many incarnations on every new pc from every major OEM because that's what customer want. They want wireless to 'just work'. They want their digital camera to work with their newly acquired pc, they want their cam-corder to work with their new pc, they want their web-cam to work with their new pc.

Windows will do that, XP will not be shipped, Vista will. That's what the customer will get, a nice new shiney computer with Vista installed and guess what, it will deliver 'more or less' what the customer wants.

Like it or not, Windows Vista will be a good release, it will improve upon security (based on win2k3 codebase it definately will), improve upon user interface and give end users that 'why on earth would i try linux' feel'.

Linux has been trying to get OEMs to load but NOBODY wants Linux on a laptop or a desktop. There's absolutely NO integration - you can't run popular plugins like Quicktime or WindowsMedia, there's no legal DVD/MP3 player - redhat or novell need to license that and swallow the loss if they want to be taken seriously by Mac and Win heads. Last time I checked, cut/paste was all over the place in Linux - it only works for text. Drag-drop is all over the place, installing software is a pain because there's no "setup" in linux - drivers for audio, printers and wireless are all over the place.

SHort story - it sucks and nobody can fix this unless the developers can get their heads out of the "freesoftware" philosophy and focus on technical superiority.

Actually other distros such as Linspire, Mandriva and Xandros provide these kind of workaround. Red Hat and Novell primary target entreprise. The real problem is these listed formats are patented, both Red Hat and Novell are not interested to spend money to support these formats.

Drag-drop is all over the place, installing software is a pain because there's no "setup" in linux - drivers for audio, printers and wireless are all over the place

That is for power users perspective who are familiar to Windows/OSX installation. One needs to understand a Linux distro is different from Windows. Once you provide a good explanation about how-to install application, that user won't find that method harder. As for audio, printers and wireless, it is all about manufacturers decision than Linux itself.

1. It will allow them to continue to make a huge profit, the R&D for Vista is being expensed against XP's income anyway. Blackcomb will be expensed against Vista.

2. A huge number of corporate IT departments lease equipment, so they are on a 24-36 month technology refresh cycle. Once these corporate IT departments test and certify Vista, they will make it the new standard and any new PCs will have Vista instead of XP.

3. MSFT will use productivity features in Office 12 to drive adoption of the Office Suite, and tie it back to Vista, this will provide IT departments with the motivation they need to support Vista.

4. A major hurdle Linux has is the need for FLAWLESS support for Office documents. A corporation that migrates to Linux, then has compatibility issues with their clients Office documents is going to be a corporation looking for a new CIO.

5. New PCs from PC vendors will have Vista instead of XP. Dell and the rest will not PUSH Linux, they may make it available, but won't push it, because they don't want to take the support calls from people asking why their favorite windows game won't work on their new Dell box that is running Red Hat or something.

MSFT will be just fine. Vista along with the next how ever many versions of Windows will continue to generate a significant top line for MSFT and keep the shareholders happy.

"4. A major hurdle Linux has is the need for FLAWLESS support for Office documents. A corporation that migrates to Linux, then has compatibility issues with their clients Office documents is going to be a corporation looking for a new CIO."

This is exactly what is wrong with the State of MA., moving to ODF. They can move to any format they believe is politically correct, but they are going to be "the man on the moon" when it comes to opening documents from other states and the federal government.

Unless you're collaborating on something, exchanging editable word processor documents makes absolutely no sense. Even incoming document I've seen recently coming in from suppliers or other UK local government communication has been in PDF format. And you'll notice PDF is one of MAs supported formats.

Internally a word processor format that plays nicely with XML standards is going to fit in nicely with Service Orientated Architectures and make it a lot easier to work with. We've got a system built on processing Word documents, and have constant problems due to non-standard HTML exported from Word. We curse it almost daily and would love to be working with something more sane like OpenDocument. The only way to reliably (cough!) work with a Word document is through the program that created it.

Corporate use of word processor documents is changing. They need to be more than black boxes and tying everything together with macros just doesn't scale. Microsoft's XML format is going it's own way as usual, instead of making use of existing standards, so just won't plug in with the standard tools. There's a move away from filesystems to document management systems that manage metadata, the more closed a format the more difficulty it is going to have sitting in this world. The content, semantics and document formatting need to be easily accessible. The Word XML format just doesn't enable easy access to those three things, OpenDocument does.

Being a person living in MA I don't think your comment is accurate. We already use Open Office in our office and the ODF format doesn't create any problems at all for us. If we need to share something with the public we create a PDF or export to Word 97 format. If you are going to make a general statement about use you need to back it up with some facts (Dept. of Correction MA employee).

2. A huge number of corporate IT departments lease equipment, so they are on a 24-36 month technology refresh cycle. Once these corporate IT departments test and certify Vista, they will make it the new standard and any new PCs will have Vista instead of XP

A huge number of IT department already have corporate licenses agreements for win2000 or Xp, they upgrade PC's when needed and use their already licensed OS. Huge numbers of other corporations are switching to terminal server solutions like Citrix, removing most of the upgrade needs.

3. MSFT will use productivity features in Office 12 to drive adoption of the Office Suite, and tie it back to Vista, this will provide IT departments with the motivation they need to support Vista.

Most corporation will actually not have any great benefit from those features, and when analyzing costs they will see no savings in a costly upgrade. Corporations have already started looking into switching some of their employees to OO rather than having to invest in more new Office licenses.

4. A major hurdle Linux has is the need for FLAWLESS support for Office documents. A corporation that migrates to Linux, then has compatibility issues with their clients Office documents is going to be a corporation looking for a new CIO.

Those compability issues with Office are small since only fractions of most companies have any contact with customers and clients. Hence only a small portion of the employees actually need that supposedly flawless support, format on internal documents are purely a company policy. A coporation cutting the cost on the majority of company desktops is going to be a company looking to give their CIO a bonus or a raise.

5. New PCs from PC vendors will have Vista

And that's the real source of revenue Vista will have. Home users will not upgrade unless they get new computers and corporations will stay with their existing licenses as long as possible.

1. It will allow them to continue to make a huge profit, the R&D for Vista is being expensed against XP's income anyway. Blackcomb will be expensed against Vista.

Software development like that will always have large costs up front. And any given year, MS will have huge costs related to OS development.

2. A huge number of corporate IT departments lease equipment, so they are on a 24-36 month technology refresh cycle. Once these corporate IT departments test and certify Vista, they will make it the new standard and any new PCs will have Vista instead of XP.

I donīt think that it is all that comon to lease IT-equipment (at least here in Europe). It is my experience, that upgrade cycles has become longer, partly due to maturation of the desktop environemnt, and partly due to the lessened strategic importance of the desktop (more applications are served via webbased interfaces).

Upgrade cycles on 24-36 months interval sounds awfully short to me.

3. MSFT will use productivity features in Office 12 to drive adoption of the Office Suite, and tie it back to Vista, this will provide IT departments with the motivation they need to support Vista.

Totally agree - this is their strategy. But how many people will yearn for a new Office suite with a brand new interface remains to be seen.

MSFT will be just fine. Vista along with the next how ever many versions of Windows will continue to generate a significant top line for MSFT and keep the shareholders happy.

Keep shareholders happy? I donīt think shareholders are all that happy to begin with. The MSFT stock has been stagnant for the last couple of years, and looking from a 5 year perspective it is down. A company the size of MS needs huge growth in order to increase the stock price. I have no doubt that Vista and Office will increase the sales - but will it be enough?

On a larger scale, Microsoft will have to deal with the fact, that a major part of its earnings are coming from their Windows and Office cash cows. How will MS be able to maintain their monopoly-like margins (and these margins are their bread and butter) on these products, in a world that moves towards open standards and where the strategic importance of the desktop becomes smaller and smaller.

I think that MS is beginning to look old and vulnerable.

My guess: Within 5-7 years MS will have too make some very deep cuts in order to satisfy the stockmarket.

1. It will allow them to continue to make a huge profit, the R&D for Vista is being expensed against XP's income anyway. Blackcomb will be expensed against Vista.

If they can convince people to buy it. Free alternatives like Linux looks more polished and better and better these days. I think they could make more money if they change to a service oriented business model, and give the OS away at no charge. That would be a very effective way to block newcomers like Linux to the desktop market.

2. A huge number of corporate IT departments lease equipment, so they are on a 24-36 month technology refresh cycle. Once these corporate IT departments test and certify Vista, they will make it the new standard and any new PCs will have Vista instead of XP.

Even if companies replace their hardware at that rate, it doesn't mean that they change OS that frequenlty. Test, certify and train your staff for a new OS is a costly business that you don't want to do unless the new OS offers significant business advantages. As most businesses are allready well served by win2k, or XP, my guess is that companies will upgrade when their product is end of lifed. In the case of XP that would be in 2011. By then many new alternatives may have arrived, and the current ones like Linux and MacOS-X will have evolved giving Microsoft much harder competition.

3. MSFT will use productivity features in Office 12 to drive adoption of the Office Suite, and tie it back to Vista, this will provide IT departments with the motivation they need to support Vista.

Office 12, will have a new userinterface and a new file format. This will make an upgrade very costly just like the upgrade of the OS. Most people will also find it much more easy to just switch to OpenOffice once older version of MS-Office gets end of lifed as they have very similar user interface.

4. A major hurdle Linux has is the need for FLAWLESS support for Office documents. A corporation that migrates to Linux, then has compatibility issues with their clients Office documents is going to be a corporation looking for a new CIO.

In reality most docuents that are older than six months are never going to be modified, so they could just as well be converted to PDF. Today the failure rate for opening Microsoft documents with openoffice is about the same as the failure rate of opening an older verision of a Microsoft formatted document in the latest version of MS-Office.

5. New PCs from PC vendors will have Vista instead of XP. Dell and the rest will not PUSH Linux, they may make it available, but won't push it, because they don't want to take the support calls from people asking why their favorite windows game won't work on their new Dell box that is running Red Hat or something.

Linux have very little to offer to the home user, so they will probably run Vista, but business users will decide what OS to run, from what is good for business, not from what is preinstalled on the box. In most cases this will mean ordering it with whatever OS that is allready in use within the organization, as long as that OS is supported. By the time it is not supported Microsoft will face competition from a much more evolved Linux desktop than we see today.

Microsoft also faces the problem of Linux applications being ported to windows making people less dependent on the windows OS. Especially will the new QT4 license make a big difference. Other factor that could help to raise the awareness of Linux would be the $100 MIT computer gadget that apperantly will run Linux.

MSFT will be just fine. Vista along with the next how ever many versions of Windows will continue to generate a significant top line for MSFT and keep the shareholders happy.

Microsoft have enough money to stay in the business for a very long time regardless of what happens. If they will keep their shareholders happy is another matter.
The microsoft strategy have been to schrink wrap standardized components. If good, or even good enough such components gets available for free, Microsoft is in trouble in the long run. Just look at what happened with internet explorer. In the beginning it was a very substandard web browser that nobody thought would beat Netscape, but it was free. Similar things could, and probably will happen to OSes and Office suites as well.

Here in Brazil, we buy Windows on the streets for something around 5 dollars. So I think Vista will reach desktop computers very quickly, unless, of course, that it's unusable on our current hardware at realease date. But anyway, if it's just a little a slower, and really more secure, I can see a lot of cousins that will install Vista on auntie's pc, as it happened before with XP that was slower than 98 but a great deal more stable.

In the long run, no one using Windows in the business can avoid not to migrate to new versions of Windows or Office.

But to be honest, I have many clients using Windows and most of them just migrated to Windows XP or 2000 and Office 11.

One customer was runing till last year Windows 98 and Office 95 on every system (about 6'000). When I was asking the responsable IT stuff about their motivation not to move to Windows XP or Windows 2000 (btw: last year they moved to Windows 2000) they gived me the following answer: "Why moving to a new OS and Office suite? We will not sell more of our insurances by just moving to a new OS and Office suite."

And that's exactly what's holding most of the companies I know, to move to a new OS or Office suite.

I personaly would move, but if I would manage serval thousend systems and I would be responsable for them, then I would think twice before moving to a new system.

I am as well not buying a new car, whenever the brand I am using is producing a new version of my current car. If I would have the money, then I would not think about that and move to whatever I like. But runing a business and beeing successfull in the business is not that much related in if you use the newest version of a OS or not.

The other issue I see, is the fact that over here in Europe most companies have a upgrade time range of 4 years and most of them do not roll out a dot zero release of Windows. Most of them wait till service pack 1.

I would be very much surpirzed to see a mass migration in the european companies to Windows Vista in 2006 and 2007. I think most of them will wait till 2008/2009.

... It's like saying "Michellin own 80% of the tire market, they make a new model which works on all new cars, this might pump up their profits"

This is ludicrus :-)
Forget about people upgrading think of this:
1. new OEM PCs will come with Vista - there are a ton of them!
2. Site licenses in large organization
3. some upgraders of their current systems

All those things together GUARANTEE that vista will pump up microsoft's profits. After all, it's not like they have another product which people can (realistically) choose from.
Your options are basically Home, Pro, Media Center, Server.

First -> I honestly hope microsoft does continue to make a profit. Can you imagine what would happen if they crashed and all there programmers were laid off? I live in Kansas City and the effect of sprint firing 10K employee's hit everyone. I didn't work at sprint but because of that my carrer was shot.
I couldn't find a good job because much more qualified people were taking job's that were in my level. I ended up going to work as a cashier along with a network admin with years of experiance that used to be a team lead over at sprint.

Second -> Until linux has a good installer and a good range of software that runs on it (and were not talking about all the hacked together software that could replace good solid comercial applications but are much harder to use) it will not be a viable OS.

1. They need to lose the dependancies and focus on a single API (ex: DirectX). Although I would base it off of OpenGL & OpenAL.
2. They need to come up with a centralized hardware management app that doesn't rely on the editing 'text files'. Often times the graphical hardware setup programs on many distro's don't work properly with multiple monitors for instance or easily allow you to load drivers for devices on every startup. Ofcourse the work around is knowing which text files you need and what you have to say in them.
3. There need's to be some organized install procedure for software so the user doesn't have to mess with all the messy stuff.

It's much cheaper honestly to develop and support applications for microsoft windows. The reason is you don't have to support linux. In windows you never get 'my printer isn't working', 'My middle button won't scroll', etc...

I don't want people to think i'm linux bashing or anything. It's a much better server than windows, I like it very much as a non-desktop os. Apache/MySQL/PHP are all technologies that I use and love. I use Firefox and OpenOffice on my windows box and these are great products. That said for the non-techie vista will probably be a much better alternative than linux. Not to mention it will have the support of a large corporation behind it which they actually does a pretty decent job given that range of hardware (granted as long as you have a good AV/Firewall).

I think people who think Vista will not succeed are a lot like the Arabs in the 1967 war. They are completely delusional. I predict that Vista will totally destroy all competition. Linux will be absolutely destroyed. Only crazy idealogues will continue to use it. Java will die. Macs may still exist but only as a toy.

The reason for Microsoft dominance is that they have created the ultimate platform for creating rich fully-featured web applications. All the elements are in place. They have a managed runtime environment (compare JVM). Secondly they have Xaml which makes it easy to create rich gui applications that can easily be delivered over the internet (compare XUL). Thirdly they have a rich API that can never be fully matched by competitors like Java/Flash/XUL because Microsoft has direct access to the operating system. Also the webapps will be well integrated with the operating system unlike Java. In fact it might not be possible to tell the difference between a Microsoft webapp and a local application.

If you are on Linux based computer how will you access .Net based webapps? Using Mono? Why use Mono when it will never be as good as .Net. It will not provide good equivalents for the services provided by Avalon (graphics), WinFS (filesystem) and Indigo (web services). In other words a significant portion of the internet will consist of microsoft web apps which will be inaccessible from Linux/Unix and Mac computers.

Why will people use .Net to create Vista webapps. Firstly because it is possible which wasn't the case before because .Net didn't exist. Second because there are tonnes of Windows developers out there. For the first time Microsoft has a proprietary way of creating webapps and their solution is the best out there.

I agree that Vista will surprise people, if only from a platform aspect. The OS itself may not be as nice as it could be, but the platform is kick ass. I wish more people would understand that there is a difference between the OS [experience] and the platform. Third party devs leveraging the platform is what will really make Vista good.

I don't agree, however, that it will "destroy" linux and java. I think it will just slowdown the the move to other platforms that people are making because of the windows security problems. And maybe reverse the trend, but only slightly.

A lot of businesses won't want to use Vista right away. But I think once the ISVs start putting out the Vista-only stuff (that use WinFX and .Net), it will become more appealing to businesses.

... is generated primarily from its Windows and Office flagship products. For Windows, the overwhelming majority of revenue (99%+) comes from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs: Dell, HP, Gateway, IBM, etc). Less than 1% of Microsoft's revenue comes from upgrades on existing hardware. Thus, the question of whether Windows Vista will be successful is largely an academic question which hinges on how quickly OEMs start offering the product. If XP is any sign, Microsoft can expect to gain 50% to 60% market share within 3 years of offering Windows Vista. Not bad for a product that many people around here aren't interested in.